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Maple Leafs: Blue and White Disease gives way to bloodlust: Feschuk

If you were giving Toronto’s NHLers a nickname to wear with their soon-to-sprout playoff beards, you’d do worse than, say, The Bay Street Bullies.

The Leafs' Colton Orr squares off against Ottawa's Chris Neil at the Air Canada Centre last month. Toronto leads the NHL this season in fighting majors, with 40 in 41 games.
(LUCAS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Here’s one thing you probably didn’t know about the agony of NHL fighting.

Frazer McLaren, the Maple Leafs enforcer, came to practice on Sunday with a face marred by a collection of nasty-looking red marks. The abrasions were, presumably, the fist-induced fallout of his Saturday-night fight with Montreal’s Brandon Prust. But McLaren corrected an erroneous assumption.

“It’s just a little jersey burn,” McLaren said.

Jersey burn?

“If you get the jersey rubbing on your face (during a fight), it’s almost like sandpaper,” McLaren said. “We call it jersey burn. It’s not so much from the punches. Sometimes it’s punches, but (Saturday) night it was a lot of jersey burns.”

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Here are a few things you may or may not know about the ecstasy of the first decent Leafs season in almost forever. The Leafs lead the NHL in hits. They stand first in the league in total penalty minutes. They’ve racked up an NHL-topping 40 fighting majors in 41 games, which means they’ve fought twice as much as more than half the league.

In other words, Blue and White Disease, the affliction of lazy entitlement that’s often been used to explain the longest active absence from the post-season in the NHL, has given way to a passion for black and blue and blood. Don Cherry, who spent part of Saturday night insisting that the chief difference between this season and last season is that the Leafs are now “playing their tough guys,” clearly approves.

If you were giving Toronto’s NHLers a nickname to wear with their soon-to-sprout playoff beards, you’d do worse than, say, The Bay Street Bullies.

“That’s not bad,” said Mark Fraser, the Leafs defenceman who has partaken in nine NHL fights this season.

Said Joffrey Lupul: “I played in Philly — I don’t think they’d be too happy if we used that (nickname).”

All the more reason to use it, of course. Sure, you’d be borrowing from history. But the Philadelphia-based franchise that gave us the lawless Broad Street Bullies of the bench-clearing 1970s has allowed the Leafs to hook and jab their way to the top of the league’s face-punching standings. When it comes to total fighting majors this season, Toronto is pummelling Philly by the score of 40-29.

Precisely what it will mean when the games mean the most is anyone’s guess. But we do know this: fighting generally becomes less prevalent in the post-season. Last season, for instance, there were fights in 34 per cent of regular-season games, according to hockeyfights.com. But come playoff time, just 22 per cent of games included fisticuffs. There were precisely zero fighting majors doled out in the 2012 Stanley Cup final, and only one fight in two conference-final series.

Given the Leafs have fought in an average of 98 per cent of their games this year — given that the likes of Nazem Kadri claim the violence clears space for the skill guys — it’s fair to wonder what the change of tone and tactics will do to the group’s mentality.

The stock answer around the dressing room, of course, is that it won’t do much of anything.

“It’s not a trademark of us to go out and fight,” Carlyle said. “Our trademark is we want to be a physical hockey club. We want to be a strong forechecking hockey club. If that leads to physical one-on-one confrontation, then that’s the way we deal with it. But we’re not specifically going out there to fight.”

Don’t tell that to the likes of Colton Orr and McLaren, who have obviously participated in many preordained tête-à-têtes with rival enforcers.

Still, no one on the Leafs claimed to have a definitive answer for why fighting diminishes when the regular season concludes.

“Maybe some guys are afraid of being hurt, or whatever it is,” said McLaren, he of the 10 fighting majors in 2013.

Fraser theorized that playoff hockey is so crucial and intense, “guys would rather be playing” than sitting in the penalty box.

Carlyle, for his part, pointed out that teams tend to be “very, very careful on the instigator”— meaning players would rather avoid a fight than take an additional penalty for being deemed the catalyst of a tilt not ignited by mutual consent. Witness Carlyle’s 2006-07 Anaheim Ducks, who led the league with 71 regular-season fights before they won the Stanley Cup tournament while partaking in precisely four scraps.

“There’s a lot more discipline displayed (in the playoffs),” said Carlyle, “and you have to turn the other cheek in some situations.”

Discipline might not be a problem for the Leafs. If concussion-swapping is in their DNA, retaliatory stick work generally is not. If you add up minor penalties for slashing, high sticking and cross-checking this season, no team in the league has fewer than Toronto’s combined total of 15.

Orr, the team’s leader in fights this season with 12, acknowledged that staged fighting can get old in a best-of-seven series.

“In the playoffs I guess you get more fights that are spur-of-the-moment,” Orr said.

Indeed, last season’s first round saw the high-scoring likes of Sidney Crosby, Claude Giroux and Anze Kopitar dropping mitts in the midst of obvious animus. Lupul said impromptu fighting among un-designated hitters comes with a higher “motivational factor.”

To that end, Lupul offered a stone-faced vow: “I only fight in the playoffs.”

Lupul, currently recovering from a concussion, was presumably joking. Or perhaps not. Though he has engaged in only a handful of NHL fights during his nine-year career, one of those imbroglios did come in the post-season — a 2006 square-off with Jamie Lundmark.

Fraser, informed of Lupul’s assertion, laughed a little: “I guess we’ll have to wait and see for that one.”

While we do, perhaps Leafs Nation can brainstorm a better nickname than Bay Street Bullies. And perhaps the equipment industry can tackle a cure for jersey burn.

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